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Innovation, agility and speed are all synonymous with market
leadership. A company’s ability to rapidly deliver quality
applications that support business goals, meet customer demand
and drive innovation is critical to business success, and some
would say to a company’s survival.

Added to this is the reality that expectations for application
performance and availability are rising with increased adoption
of mobile devices, social media and the cloud. As applications
have become a competitive focus for companies, organizations are
laser-focused on how to deliver the right applications to market
quickly. That’s where "continuous delivery" comes in.

Continuous delivery is a collaborative,
agile software delivery process that involves deploying
smaller sets of features more frequently, and through an
integrated and automated set of processes, bringing a new app
or new version from code to production.

When implemented collaboratively by development and operations
teams, continuous delivery not only drives agility in the
software delivery approach but produces real quantitative and
qualitative return on investment for organizations. Studies have
shown that companies with a continuous delivery capability are
able to deploy their software up to 30 times more frequently than
their peers.

As organizations recognize that “real ROI” is derived from
investing in a more collaborative and agile software delivery
process, a number of companies are addressing this market need.
Companies within the DevOps/continuous delivery ecosystem include
BMC, Electric Cloud, HP, Chef and Puppet Labs. Offerings from
these companies streamline the process of bringing an application
from development to production.

So the next question is, how can my company see “real ROI” from a
continuous-delivery approach? How do I actually quantify what
benefits this would bring to my team?

The good news is that while implementing a continuous-delivery
approach requires a “skills adjustment,” it does not typically
demand additional headcount or even an upfront investment. Also,
keep in mind that an organization can adopt continuous-delivery
best practices in stages, with each automated step delivering
additional quality and efficiency-related value.

Lets take a look at how a team can actually measure the potential
ROI of a continuous-delivery approach. There are three distinct
areas that are measurable:

Cost reduction due to increased quality and fewer application
failures

Gains from increased IT and development team productivity

Continuous delivery allows organizations to deliver features and
fixes much faster, allowing companies to respond more quickly to
market demands and gain competitive advantage. A survey
commissioned by Computer Associates found that companies reported
almost 20 percent increase in top line
revenue.

The second measurable benefit is fewer failed applications due to
increased application quality. Usually, companies calculate the
cost of application failures using measurable costs associated
with complete failures or chronic poor performance. A survey by Puppet Labs found that
DevOps-enabled organizations experience a full 50 percent
fewer application failures.

Another approach is to measure the time to recover from an issue.
RebelLabs found in their research that teams who have not yet
implemented continuous delivery (40 percent of those surveyed)
take on average 60 minutes or longer to restore service in case
of an application issue, with the majority of incidents lasting
at least 30 minutes. In contrast, those who were taking advantage
of continuous delivery are able to restore services in well under
30 minutes on average.

Companies will also save time and money with increased IT
productivity. In many organizations, valuable time is eaten up
due to inefficient processes, lack of visibility and reliance on
repetitive manual tasks. Additional examples of time “wastage”
include time spent by developers diagnosing problems and time
spent by testers on manual testing.

The IT Ops & DevOps Productivity Report found that IT
engineers in traditional settings spend about three hours more
per week to complete their normal tasks as compared to a
continuous delivery-enabled organization. This ended up meaning
that on average, continuous delivery and DevOps-oriented teams
save about 4.9 hours per week per person completing their core
tasks compared to traditional IT staff.

There are a few “soft ROI” benefits associated with continuous
delivery that are worth noting, including market advantages
gained from more flexibility, higher customer satisfaction
through faster response to user feedback, boosted competitive
advantage and improved employee motivation.

Ultimately, continuous delivery offers a streamlined application
delivery mechanism that meets both internal business and external
customer demands for innovative quality applications. During the
past couple of years, we have already started to see those
companies who have truly embraced a continuous delivery model
achieve “market-leader” status, and I expect this dynamic to only
accelerate.